You know youve ben here before — you’re in a basement packed with drunk college freshmen. In the back of the room is a table stacked high with solo cups and a couple cases of Natural Light. (If this is a party with the hip crowd, substitute Pabst Blue Ribbon.) Next to that is a jug of furniture polish labeled “Vladimir’s Russian Vodka.” You can tell it’s the good stuff because of the animated green stink lines emanating from the bottle every time someone removes the cap and pours a shot.
That’s no way for a suave gentleman like yourself to imbibe. What is a sophisticate to do?
Funny you should ask. In fact, this was the very question asked by millions of americans in the 1920s, when due to the Volstead Act and 18th amendment, it had been illegal to purchase or manufacture alcohol. This didnt stop anyone from drinking, much like how the legal age limit isnt stopping those 18 year-old frat wannabes. However, it did prevent people from getting quality alcohol, much as your present finances keep them from you.
There is an answer! It was then, is now, and forever shall be — the cocktail. While cocktails have been around since at least the 1860s, the basic concepts haven’t undergone much change. Bartending may seem like an arcane art at first, but most drinks fall into a few simple families – sours, cream trios, aromatics and so forth – each one having a number of common ingredients and concepts, and each one using a basic set of proportions for all the ingredients.
Today, we shall focus on the sour family, which includes everything from trendy girl drinks like the cosmopolitan and the mojito to old standbys like the gin & tonic and whiskey & coke.
The basic formula of the sour is this:
base spirit + sweet + sour
with an optional addition of seltzer or soda for the “fizz” subfamily.
You can play around with the balance of these ingredients quite a bit, but the general idea is that no single ingredient should overwhelm the others. Even if you opt for a cocktail more on the sweet side, the base spirit should still make up about half of the non-fizzy ingredients. A good ratio to start with is 3 parts spirit to 2 parts sweet and 1 part sour — it should be pretty balanced from that point, giving you a good starting point to find your own sweet spot.
Here’s what you need to make ‘em:
1. Spirits. While theres literally thousands of spirits to choose from, when one is starting out they only need a few: vodka, light rum, and bourbon. Best value for these would probably Smirnoff, Cruzan, and Jim Beam, as you can get a whole handle of each of those for about 20 bucks. We’ll take care of gin, brandy, and tequila in later installments. And don’t worry about making flavored vodkas; those are cheap and easy to make at home.
2. Sweetners. If you were just drinking the liquor straight, you wouldn’t be making cocktails now, would you? One adds to the base spirit to balance its natural harshness. These include sodas, (fizzy sweetners) liqueurs (alcoholic sweetners), juices and syrups. Liqueurs can get pretty pricey, but you don’t really need a whole shelf of them to make great cocktails — you can make thousands of cocktails with only triple sec or curacao, which should cost no more than $10 for a fifth. Sodas and juices are cheap and abundant, so you should have plenty of these at your disposal — I’d recommend having lots of Coke Sprite(or their PepsiCo or store brand equivalents), orange juice, cranberry juice, and grenadine. If you want to use plain sugar, however, you’re gonna need to mix it with hot water first to dissolve it into simple syrup, because sugar crystals do not dissolve in alcohol.
3. Souring Agents. The key piece of the sour cocktail puzzle is the souring agent itself. This, under almost all circumstances, will be either a lemon or a lime. Don’t get lazy and get that plastic lemon thing or prebottled “sour mix” – the real stuff just tastes fresher. It only takes a minute to chop up a lime and squeeze the juice out of it, and you can make all sorts of neat garnishes with them.
4. Ice. It may not seem like it, but ice is also a critical ingredient in your cocktail. Firstly, nobody likes lukewarm cocktails. Secondly, the diluting effect the ice has on the drink helps bring all the ingredients together while just slightly mellowing them out a bit further. You’re gonna use tons of ice, so pick up a bag at the corner store or save up a couple trays worth in ziploc freezer bags.
5. Shaker. Those drinks ain’t gonna mix themselves. No need to worry about a fancy metal shaker for now; a large glass and a solo cup pressed mouth to mouth work together wondefully.
6. Measuring Cup Don’t try to eyeball this on your first time out; its really easy to make a drink way too strong or sweet by trying to guess your way through the recipe. I heartily recommend the OXO mini measuring cup as it’s easy to read, precise, and relatively cheap.
So, what does one do with these ingredients?
For all the cocktails listed below, add the measured ingredients to your shaker, then add a handful of ice. Press the shaker together, and shake vigorously. Serve in the solo cup you used for the shaker. If there is a soda in the cocktail, pour that in after shaking.
Whiskey Sour
1.5 oz bourbon, 1 oz simple syrup, .5 oz lemon juice
Daquiri
1.5 oz light rum, 1 oz simple syrup, .5 oz lime juice
See that? Two seemingly very different cocktails made in almost exactly the same way. This is the basic sour recipe. What if we use a different sweetner?
Bourble
1.5 oz bourbon, 1 oz triple sec, .5 oz lemon juice
Outrigger
1.5 oz light rum, 1 oz triple sec, .5 oz lime juice
Again, two more cocktails with only one new ingredient. Use tequila instead of rum and you’ve got yourself a margarita; Use brandy instead of whiskey and you’ve got a sidecar. See where im going with this? Use grenadine instead of triple sec and youve got a whiskey rose and a bacardi cocktail.
Hell, you could even use pancake syrup for these drinks, though you wouldn’t necessarily want to drink them. Let’s move on.
Screwdriver
1.5 oz vodka, 4 oz orange juice
Cape Codder
1.5 oz vodka, 4 oz cranberry juice
Now wait a second, whats going on here? What happened to the ratios? What happened to the sweet and the sour and all that? Well, with our previous recipes, we were using syrups, which were pretty much just sugar and water. Both of these juices are sweet, but not nearly as sweet as pure sugar. Secondly, both of these juices are slightly sour, though not nearly as sour as pure lemon or lime juice. Therefore 4 oz orange or cranberry juice contains the equivalent 1 oz of sugary goodness and .5 oz acid. Of course, if you personally feel that these drinks are imbalanced the way they are, you can add half an ounce of simple syrup or lemon juice to push it in the direction you prefer.
Now, what if you want to use juice and syrup in a drink?
Rum Sunrise
2 oz rum, 4 oz orange juice, 5. oz lemon juice
add .5 oz grenadine after shaking for “sunrise effect”
Add more liquor to maintain the balance, of course. Now what do we do with drinks with soda in them?
Rum & Coke
1.5 oz rum, .5 oz lime juice
top with Coke after shaking
Whiskey & Coke
1.5 oz whiskey, .5 oz lime juice
top with Coke after shaking
Have you ever had a lousy rum & coke and wondered why people would have mixed them together in the first place? Well, now you know the secret ingredient – the juice of half of a lime turns a mediocre drink into a classic. Same goes for the whiskey version — a little bit of lime juice accents the fizz and offsets the odd vanilla cream taste of the other ingredients. And if one were to add syrups to these?
Cherry Vanilla Coke
1.5 oz whiskey, .5 oz grenadine, .75 oz lime juice
top with Coke after shaking
Shirley Temple Black
1.5 oz vodka, .5 oz grenadine, .75 oz lime juice
top with Sprite after shaking
So you see how it works now? Once you’ve got the basic formula down, you can make dozens of cocktails with only a handful of ingredients. If you just buy one new thing a week – let’s say you get blackcurrant liqueur or something like that – now you can theoretically make dozens more – black roses, black sunrises, blackcurrant cape codders, and so forth. One bottle of liquor or juice or syrup a week should average out to less than $40 a month and youll have a repertoire of thousands of drinks by the end of the year.
